A Wilderness of Monkeys, Part 2
Feb. 20th, 2010 09:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_t_rainSorry it's taken so long to get back to the Merchant of Venice fic. Part 1 is here:
Who Chooseth Me Shall Get as Much as He Deserves
Of course it was madness, and of course Shylock stayed. He told himself it was only the natural madness of the flesh; what man would not have taken what Portia was offering, especially after so many years alone? Besides, Lorenzo insisted that he remain their guest. He had unexpectedly become his son-in-law’s favorite person after discovering a loophole in the Duke’s tax codes that could save Lorenzo and Jessica fifty ducats a year. Before he knew it, Lorenzo had bragged to his friends, and he had a dozen young gentlemen living beyond their means begging for his advice.
He charged ten percent of everything he saved them, and still they kept calling at Lorenzo’s. They came furtively, as if they suspected there was some witchcraft in what he did, but they all wanted his services. It was exactly like being a money-lender. He felt right at home.
The incompetence of most of the young gentlemen alternately angered and amused him. “Did your friends not learn simple arithmetic when they were children?” he asked his son-in-law.
Lorenzo shook his head. “We learned to write letters in the style of Cicero, and to spoil a fair hand so that no one would mistake us for a secretary or a scrivener. That is all I remember.”
Shylock rolled his eyes. “Teach my grandson the Christian prayers if you will,” he said to Jessica, “but for God’s sake teach him to add and divide.”
“I will teach my child as I see fit!” said Jessica.
“I think our good father is right, my dear,” said Lorenzo. “I never could see the use of Cicero.”
Shylock permitted himself a sardonic smile at this. Evidently, fifty ducats a year were enough to change him from a bad father-in-law to a good father.
* * *
Three days after Antonio’s departure, Bassanio followed him to Venice. On the fourth day, a messenger brought a note from Portia: Would Shylock do her the favor of sparing a few hours to look over the accounts at Belmont? She would see that his services were richly rewarded.
Jessica frowned when she read the note. “Is there no steward at Belmont to attend to such matters?”
“Who, old Lucio?” said Lorenzo. “I’d be surprised if he knows a seven from a nine.”
Jessica said nothing, but she was still frowning when Shylock left the house.
* * *
Lorenzo and Jessica’s house – which they called a cottage, though it was far bigger than any cottage Shylock had ever seen – stood within the grounds of Belmont. Nevertheless, it took Shylock a quarter of an hour to walk up the avenue to the great house, for Belmont was the sort of country house that people built when they could afford to live out of sight of the source of their wealth. No ploughmen worked the acres around it, and no vineyards were planted; there were only beds of bright flowers, ornamental hedges, and a park where deer ran free, at least until the lord and lady of the house wanted venison.
It was not the sort of house Shylock would have chosen to build, even in the days of his prosperity. He could not imagine living so far from Venice; he would have missed the smells of salt and pitch and a thousand nameless things rotting into slime, the glittering palaces, the crowds of young men making and losing fortunes. Here, all was still. Belmont rose clean and white, its pillars meticulously imitated from Roman temples. It was not his world. He did not know whether to knock at the door or to slink about looking for a side entrance; a servant ended his perplexity by meeting him in the avenue and escorting him inside.
He was an elderly man, and too deaf to understand much of what Shylock said, but evidently he had instructions to bring Shylock to the lady of the house. If the servant thought it was odd that she received him in a bedchamber, he expressed no sign of it. Well trained, Shylock thought.
Portia dismissed the servant. “You are welcome to Belmont, Signor Shylock. Shall we begin?”
He stared at her. Before he could ask just what she thought they were to begin, another servant’s voice called, “My lady!”
“Excuse me,” said Portia. “Let me leave you with some earnest of my return.”
The kiss she gave him almost took away his powers of reason, but he kept enough of his wits about him to take note of where she had brought him. This was a lady’s chamber, with lace curtains and a picture of the Madonna and child. In great houses, he knew, husbands and wives had separate bedchambers, even when the marriage was much happier than Portia and Bassanio’s seemed to be.
If a wife were so angry with her husband that she wanted to cuckold him in the most humiliating way possible, would she not take her lover to her husband’s bed? So. This argued for something more complicated and dangerous than mere anger. This was a woman who wanted to be known.
Very well; he had nothing better to do at the moment, so he would humor her by looking at her bookshelves. One could tell a great deal about people from their reading. There were romances, of course. Orlando furioso, Gerusalemme liberata; Jessica also read such ridiculous tales. He supposed that was where girls got the idea of disguising themselves and going off on mad adventures.
Dante; Castiglione; and, incongruously, a pile of law books. Evidently she had never let go of the fantasy of being Signor Bellario.
A scrap of white silk caught his eye. She had left her handkerchief on one of the bookshelves, rather carelessly; it was embroidered with her initial. That was foolish of her, he thought. He had heard of a Venetian who had done great mischief with just such a toy.
Now he could hear her step again in the corridor. Suppose she asked him again why he had come. What should he say? “The same reason you have sent for me; I was lonely”? It was impossible to admit so much.
She did not ask him that. As it turned out, she was in the mood for an even more unsettling conversation.
“How do you like my house?” She stood a little apart from him, as if welcoming a stranger.
“It is magnificent, my lady.”
“Is it as fine as the one near Venice, the one they call La Malcontenta?”
“I do not know. I have little experience of country villas. I have not often been invited to them.”
She took a step closer. “Shylock? Why are the Jews still Jews?”
“What?”
“I mean, would it not be easier for them to become Christians? Then they might dress as they liked, and go where they liked.”
For a split second Shylock considered slapping her in the face, but he decided that this would be unjustified. It seemed to be a sincere question, if an utterly stupid one.
“Suppose the Turk were to invade Venice,” he said after a moment. “Would you then say that all the Christians in Venice should become followers of Mahomet? Would not that be easier?”
“That is not the same.”
“Why not?” he asked, and when Portia hesitated instead of answering, he said, “I know, I know. You think it is different because your religion holds the only truth, and you want all the world to be Christians so that they may be saved. But consider this: The Turks believe the same about Mahomet. Where is the difference?”
“So the Turks and the Jews are the same as Christians? Is that what you mean to say?”
“No. Jews do not seek to make the whole world Jewish. In that they are different from you, and from the Turk. Why is it so hard, then, for you to leave them in peace?”
He noticed that he kept saying you and they when he tried to explain things to Portia, never we. He resolved to curb his tongue. Men had been denounced as false converts for saying less than he had just spoken, and he must not forget that the woman beside him was also Balthasar the lawyer. He ought never to have come.
“I do not think,” he said, putting on his cloak, “that your account-books are in much need of my attention.”
“You have not looked at them.”
“Just so. You have not brought them.”
“A touch, I do confess.” Her laugh was a little strained. “You are going to Jessica and Lorenzo’s house?”
“No. I am going home to Venice.” He recalled that Bassanio was also in Venice, and that this might sound very like a threat. “You will not be troubled with me any more, my lady. We have both trespassed where we should not.”
* * *
“You had much better stay with us until morning,” said Lorenzo. “You might still come to Venice tomorrow night if you rode fast enough, and you cannot be there tonight.”
“I have business along the way. I will leave now.”
“What business?” asked Jessica sharply.
“Not moneylending,” said Shylock, stalling for time, “if that is what you are asking.”
“That is not what I asked at all!”
Hastily, Shylock invented a debt that had to be paid that very evening in Padua, which lay some hours north of Belmont. Jessica did not look as if she believed him, and with good reason; it had never been his way to let such matters wait until the eleventh hour.
“Take my horse,” Lorenzo offered. “You can send him back with Bassanio.”
This was a generous offer, and one that Shylock could not find any reasonable excuse to refuse. Besides, as anxious as he was to avoid any further encounters with Bassanio, he was also desperate to get away from Belmont.
“Will you come again?” Jessica asked when Lorenzo went to saddle the horse.
“I do not think so.”
She looked up at him, a hundred questions in her eyes, but said nothing. He started talking to fill the silence.
“Write to me when your child is born. Look that you eat well, and do not go wandering about in the night air. And remember what I said about teaching him arithmetic!”
Jessica laughed, for no reason that Shylock could see. He wondered how he and Leah could have produced such an absurdly giddy girl. “Someday, Father,” she said, “you will learn what to say on such occasions.”
“God keep you, and send you safe deliverance.”
“That is better.” Jessica leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, and then she went back into the house and was gone.
* * *
Shylock rode hard until dusk, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and Belmont. In the morning he felt calmer; his bones ached from the last night’s ride, so he took his time in traveling to Venice. It had been a mad adventure, the sort of thing men did only once in their lives, when they felt the last embers of their youth turning to ashes. He would not think on it any longer.
It was quite late when he reached his house. On the following morning he strolled down to the Rialto, more out of long habit than because he had any particular business to transact. Besides, it was useful to learn the price of merchandise and the names of the ships that had lately come to harbor.
The afternoon was already fading when he noticed the boy. He could not say what first drew his attention, but some instinct warned him that he was being watched – though the youth’s eyes were hidden under one of the large, plumed hats that were in fashion, and though he seemed to be wandering aimlessly. So Shylock watched, too, as the boy lounged against a wall, threw one leg over a bridge, tossed a coin to a vendor and ate a skewer of meat – all the careless poses of idle Venetian youth. Too careless, and too posed.
He waited until dusk had fallen to approach the figure. “Why are you here?” he demanded.
Before his eyes, a little of the insouciance went out of the boy’s posture; she turned her face toward his, and became more girl than boy. “It seems to me that I gave you offense, the last time we spoke. I did not mean to. I have not come to make excuses for myself, but to pray your pardon.”
“You came to Venice to say that?” he asked, staggered.
“I had little else to occupy my time.” She thrust her thumbs into her belt, and her voice deepened. “Besides, I am a simple country lad, born but five miles from Venice; ‘twas not a long journey.”
He had to admit she was a good actress, but he was not in the mood for her games. “You are a woman, and far from home. You ought not to commit your safety to a strange city and a man of ill repute.”
“I do not think you would do me any harm.”
“Why not?” he asked. “I can assure you, in this city you will find men enough who will tell you I will stop at nothing to destroy an enemy.”
“I would not believe them, for I have given you your chance already. You might have taken my girdle, or some other trifle from my chamber, and gone to my husband with it. But you did not; all was as I had left it.”
He stared at her. He, too, had seen that he had an opportunity, but it had not occurred to him that she had left him alone on purpose.
“Suppose I had,” he said. “What would you have done then?”
She shrugged. “I suppose I should have found some story that would satisfy my husband.”
“Aye – you would have wept pretty, false tears, as great ladies do, and told him you were sore in need of money and had gone to the false Jew in secret for a loan, and he had demanded some pretty toy of yours as surety, and you had given it him in all innocence. And yes, he would have believed you and seen me hanged as high as Haman. A clever piece of work, my lady. I congratulate you.”
Portia flushed. “Why are you so angry at me for a thing I did not do? It is as if I were angry at you for stealing my girdle, when you did no such thing!”
He did not know how to explain why he was so angry. Partly, it was because he knew how near he had come. If he had still been in the same frame of mind as when he first came to Belmont, he would have gone to Bassanio. He did not intend to tell Portia that, but he tried to explain the other thing that angered him. “You are still setting traps for men and trying to make them stumble upon their own weaknesses. What right have you to do that? Who made you judge?”
“Why is it wrong to try people and prove the truth of what they are?”
Again, he did not know how to answer. The best answer he could give her was that there was no simple truth to people; a man who was weak in one hour might be stronger at any other time, but if you sprung your trap at the wrong moment you might never know his strength. Or, as in this case, you might not know his weakness. Portia seemed to have decided, absurdly, that he was a man to be trusted, and he found that he could not tell her he was no such thing.
He couldn’t very easily walk away, either, because he saw at once that she was not as much at home in Venice as she pretended. She kept looking about her, gawking at the gondoliers and the houses whose front steps ended in water, and she stopped at each new alley and canal that they crossed, uncertain of her way in the endless knot of the city. So he said “Follow me,” shortly, and led her to his house. It was the best thing he could think to do. It was the eve of a festival; Venice was full of music tonight, and the young men had already begun to drink and quarrel. He did not like to think of what they might do if they discovered the boy behind him was really a young woman.
He did not like Portia, not at all, but neither did he want to see her raped or beaten or thrown into a canal. And so he took her to his house, because there was nowhere else to go.
But the little fool kept wanting to linger in the streets and watch the revelers. She reminded him of Jessica, on the rare occasions when he had allowed his daughter to accompany him to the Rialto. These young women were all the same, intoxicated with the open air and the illusion of freedom. Well, perhaps he would have felt the same way if he had been born a woman.
“Come,” he said. “I would not have you seen with me.”
“Why not?” she asked, laughing a little. “No one will know me.”
“Because people will think that I have gone back to moneylending, or else taken up sodomy. I do not care to face the Duke in either case.”
She laughed again at that. Well, he supposed he had meant it to be funny, but he was not used to other people being amused by his jokes.
Shylock had bought a new house, not in the Jewish ghetto but just outside of it. There was little pleasure in becoming a Christian, after all, if one could not annoy the other Christians by moving in next door. Besides, he could not afford to keep up his old house. This one was smaller, and fortuitously inconspicuous.
“In here,” he said, unlocking the door. He had no servants living with him any more, only a woman who came in by day to cook and clean, so he had no fear of their being spotted. The old fool had forgotten to fasten the shutters on the upstairs windows again. He hastened to shut them against the clamor of fifes and tabors.
“Do you not care for music?” Portia asked.
“No.”
“I have heard it said that men who take no pleasure in music are little better than beasts, for they have no harmony in their souls.”
He stared at her for a moment, and then told her of a night he had never spoken about to any Christian. He had been a child then, in another country; there had been drunken singing, and the squealing of pipes mingling with the icy note of shattering glass. Jewish houses had been torched, and in the morning one of their neighbors had been found by the side of the road, an old man beaten to death for sport.
“So. Such men are better than beasts because they have harmony in their souls. It is an interesting notion. I must think about it some more.”
She took a step toward him. She was touching him, in the way that women touch men when their business is comfort. She had never done that before. He meant to pull away, but he let her hand linger for a moment.
“Shylock, I thought what I did was for the best.”
He had known that. He had seen them all congratulating themselves inwardly as he left the court, thinking that they had done all for the best. How could it not be a blessing to be made a Christian, after all?
He was about to tell her all the reasons she was wrong, when he realized she already knew. He remembered what it was like when the certitude of one’s first youth had given way to the perplexity of three- or four-and-twenty, and forbore to say anything more.
Who Chooseth Me Shall Get as Much as He Deserves
Of course it was madness, and of course Shylock stayed. He told himself it was only the natural madness of the flesh; what man would not have taken what Portia was offering, especially after so many years alone? Besides, Lorenzo insisted that he remain their guest. He had unexpectedly become his son-in-law’s favorite person after discovering a loophole in the Duke’s tax codes that could save Lorenzo and Jessica fifty ducats a year. Before he knew it, Lorenzo had bragged to his friends, and he had a dozen young gentlemen living beyond their means begging for his advice.
He charged ten percent of everything he saved them, and still they kept calling at Lorenzo’s. They came furtively, as if they suspected there was some witchcraft in what he did, but they all wanted his services. It was exactly like being a money-lender. He felt right at home.
The incompetence of most of the young gentlemen alternately angered and amused him. “Did your friends not learn simple arithmetic when they were children?” he asked his son-in-law.
Lorenzo shook his head. “We learned to write letters in the style of Cicero, and to spoil a fair hand so that no one would mistake us for a secretary or a scrivener. That is all I remember.”
Shylock rolled his eyes. “Teach my grandson the Christian prayers if you will,” he said to Jessica, “but for God’s sake teach him to add and divide.”
“I will teach my child as I see fit!” said Jessica.
“I think our good father is right, my dear,” said Lorenzo. “I never could see the use of Cicero.”
Shylock permitted himself a sardonic smile at this. Evidently, fifty ducats a year were enough to change him from a bad father-in-law to a good father.
* * *
Three days after Antonio’s departure, Bassanio followed him to Venice. On the fourth day, a messenger brought a note from Portia: Would Shylock do her the favor of sparing a few hours to look over the accounts at Belmont? She would see that his services were richly rewarded.
Jessica frowned when she read the note. “Is there no steward at Belmont to attend to such matters?”
“Who, old Lucio?” said Lorenzo. “I’d be surprised if he knows a seven from a nine.”
Jessica said nothing, but she was still frowning when Shylock left the house.
* * *
Lorenzo and Jessica’s house – which they called a cottage, though it was far bigger than any cottage Shylock had ever seen – stood within the grounds of Belmont. Nevertheless, it took Shylock a quarter of an hour to walk up the avenue to the great house, for Belmont was the sort of country house that people built when they could afford to live out of sight of the source of their wealth. No ploughmen worked the acres around it, and no vineyards were planted; there were only beds of bright flowers, ornamental hedges, and a park where deer ran free, at least until the lord and lady of the house wanted venison.
It was not the sort of house Shylock would have chosen to build, even in the days of his prosperity. He could not imagine living so far from Venice; he would have missed the smells of salt and pitch and a thousand nameless things rotting into slime, the glittering palaces, the crowds of young men making and losing fortunes. Here, all was still. Belmont rose clean and white, its pillars meticulously imitated from Roman temples. It was not his world. He did not know whether to knock at the door or to slink about looking for a side entrance; a servant ended his perplexity by meeting him in the avenue and escorting him inside.
He was an elderly man, and too deaf to understand much of what Shylock said, but evidently he had instructions to bring Shylock to the lady of the house. If the servant thought it was odd that she received him in a bedchamber, he expressed no sign of it. Well trained, Shylock thought.
Portia dismissed the servant. “You are welcome to Belmont, Signor Shylock. Shall we begin?”
He stared at her. Before he could ask just what she thought they were to begin, another servant’s voice called, “My lady!”
“Excuse me,” said Portia. “Let me leave you with some earnest of my return.”
The kiss she gave him almost took away his powers of reason, but he kept enough of his wits about him to take note of where she had brought him. This was a lady’s chamber, with lace curtains and a picture of the Madonna and child. In great houses, he knew, husbands and wives had separate bedchambers, even when the marriage was much happier than Portia and Bassanio’s seemed to be.
If a wife were so angry with her husband that she wanted to cuckold him in the most humiliating way possible, would she not take her lover to her husband’s bed? So. This argued for something more complicated and dangerous than mere anger. This was a woman who wanted to be known.
Very well; he had nothing better to do at the moment, so he would humor her by looking at her bookshelves. One could tell a great deal about people from their reading. There were romances, of course. Orlando furioso, Gerusalemme liberata; Jessica also read such ridiculous tales. He supposed that was where girls got the idea of disguising themselves and going off on mad adventures.
Dante; Castiglione; and, incongruously, a pile of law books. Evidently she had never let go of the fantasy of being Signor Bellario.
A scrap of white silk caught his eye. She had left her handkerchief on one of the bookshelves, rather carelessly; it was embroidered with her initial. That was foolish of her, he thought. He had heard of a Venetian who had done great mischief with just such a toy.
Now he could hear her step again in the corridor. Suppose she asked him again why he had come. What should he say? “The same reason you have sent for me; I was lonely”? It was impossible to admit so much.
She did not ask him that. As it turned out, she was in the mood for an even more unsettling conversation.
“How do you like my house?” She stood a little apart from him, as if welcoming a stranger.
“It is magnificent, my lady.”
“Is it as fine as the one near Venice, the one they call La Malcontenta?”
“I do not know. I have little experience of country villas. I have not often been invited to them.”
She took a step closer. “Shylock? Why are the Jews still Jews?”
“What?”
“I mean, would it not be easier for them to become Christians? Then they might dress as they liked, and go where they liked.”
For a split second Shylock considered slapping her in the face, but he decided that this would be unjustified. It seemed to be a sincere question, if an utterly stupid one.
“Suppose the Turk were to invade Venice,” he said after a moment. “Would you then say that all the Christians in Venice should become followers of Mahomet? Would not that be easier?”
“That is not the same.”
“Why not?” he asked, and when Portia hesitated instead of answering, he said, “I know, I know. You think it is different because your religion holds the only truth, and you want all the world to be Christians so that they may be saved. But consider this: The Turks believe the same about Mahomet. Where is the difference?”
“So the Turks and the Jews are the same as Christians? Is that what you mean to say?”
“No. Jews do not seek to make the whole world Jewish. In that they are different from you, and from the Turk. Why is it so hard, then, for you to leave them in peace?”
He noticed that he kept saying you and they when he tried to explain things to Portia, never we. He resolved to curb his tongue. Men had been denounced as false converts for saying less than he had just spoken, and he must not forget that the woman beside him was also Balthasar the lawyer. He ought never to have come.
“I do not think,” he said, putting on his cloak, “that your account-books are in much need of my attention.”
“You have not looked at them.”
“Just so. You have not brought them.”
“A touch, I do confess.” Her laugh was a little strained. “You are going to Jessica and Lorenzo’s house?”
“No. I am going home to Venice.” He recalled that Bassanio was also in Venice, and that this might sound very like a threat. “You will not be troubled with me any more, my lady. We have both trespassed where we should not.”
* * *
“You had much better stay with us until morning,” said Lorenzo. “You might still come to Venice tomorrow night if you rode fast enough, and you cannot be there tonight.”
“I have business along the way. I will leave now.”
“What business?” asked Jessica sharply.
“Not moneylending,” said Shylock, stalling for time, “if that is what you are asking.”
“That is not what I asked at all!”
Hastily, Shylock invented a debt that had to be paid that very evening in Padua, which lay some hours north of Belmont. Jessica did not look as if she believed him, and with good reason; it had never been his way to let such matters wait until the eleventh hour.
“Take my horse,” Lorenzo offered. “You can send him back with Bassanio.”
This was a generous offer, and one that Shylock could not find any reasonable excuse to refuse. Besides, as anxious as he was to avoid any further encounters with Bassanio, he was also desperate to get away from Belmont.
“Will you come again?” Jessica asked when Lorenzo went to saddle the horse.
“I do not think so.”
She looked up at him, a hundred questions in her eyes, but said nothing. He started talking to fill the silence.
“Write to me when your child is born. Look that you eat well, and do not go wandering about in the night air. And remember what I said about teaching him arithmetic!”
Jessica laughed, for no reason that Shylock could see. He wondered how he and Leah could have produced such an absurdly giddy girl. “Someday, Father,” she said, “you will learn what to say on such occasions.”
“God keep you, and send you safe deliverance.”
“That is better.” Jessica leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, and then she went back into the house and was gone.
* * *
Shylock rode hard until dusk, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and Belmont. In the morning he felt calmer; his bones ached from the last night’s ride, so he took his time in traveling to Venice. It had been a mad adventure, the sort of thing men did only once in their lives, when they felt the last embers of their youth turning to ashes. He would not think on it any longer.
It was quite late when he reached his house. On the following morning he strolled down to the Rialto, more out of long habit than because he had any particular business to transact. Besides, it was useful to learn the price of merchandise and the names of the ships that had lately come to harbor.
The afternoon was already fading when he noticed the boy. He could not say what first drew his attention, but some instinct warned him that he was being watched – though the youth’s eyes were hidden under one of the large, plumed hats that were in fashion, and though he seemed to be wandering aimlessly. So Shylock watched, too, as the boy lounged against a wall, threw one leg over a bridge, tossed a coin to a vendor and ate a skewer of meat – all the careless poses of idle Venetian youth. Too careless, and too posed.
He waited until dusk had fallen to approach the figure. “Why are you here?” he demanded.
Before his eyes, a little of the insouciance went out of the boy’s posture; she turned her face toward his, and became more girl than boy. “It seems to me that I gave you offense, the last time we spoke. I did not mean to. I have not come to make excuses for myself, but to pray your pardon.”
“You came to Venice to say that?” he asked, staggered.
“I had little else to occupy my time.” She thrust her thumbs into her belt, and her voice deepened. “Besides, I am a simple country lad, born but five miles from Venice; ‘twas not a long journey.”
He had to admit she was a good actress, but he was not in the mood for her games. “You are a woman, and far from home. You ought not to commit your safety to a strange city and a man of ill repute.”
“I do not think you would do me any harm.”
“Why not?” he asked. “I can assure you, in this city you will find men enough who will tell you I will stop at nothing to destroy an enemy.”
“I would not believe them, for I have given you your chance already. You might have taken my girdle, or some other trifle from my chamber, and gone to my husband with it. But you did not; all was as I had left it.”
He stared at her. He, too, had seen that he had an opportunity, but it had not occurred to him that she had left him alone on purpose.
“Suppose I had,” he said. “What would you have done then?”
She shrugged. “I suppose I should have found some story that would satisfy my husband.”
“Aye – you would have wept pretty, false tears, as great ladies do, and told him you were sore in need of money and had gone to the false Jew in secret for a loan, and he had demanded some pretty toy of yours as surety, and you had given it him in all innocence. And yes, he would have believed you and seen me hanged as high as Haman. A clever piece of work, my lady. I congratulate you.”
Portia flushed. “Why are you so angry at me for a thing I did not do? It is as if I were angry at you for stealing my girdle, when you did no such thing!”
He did not know how to explain why he was so angry. Partly, it was because he knew how near he had come. If he had still been in the same frame of mind as when he first came to Belmont, he would have gone to Bassanio. He did not intend to tell Portia that, but he tried to explain the other thing that angered him. “You are still setting traps for men and trying to make them stumble upon their own weaknesses. What right have you to do that? Who made you judge?”
“Why is it wrong to try people and prove the truth of what they are?”
Again, he did not know how to answer. The best answer he could give her was that there was no simple truth to people; a man who was weak in one hour might be stronger at any other time, but if you sprung your trap at the wrong moment you might never know his strength. Or, as in this case, you might not know his weakness. Portia seemed to have decided, absurdly, that he was a man to be trusted, and he found that he could not tell her he was no such thing.
He couldn’t very easily walk away, either, because he saw at once that she was not as much at home in Venice as she pretended. She kept looking about her, gawking at the gondoliers and the houses whose front steps ended in water, and she stopped at each new alley and canal that they crossed, uncertain of her way in the endless knot of the city. So he said “Follow me,” shortly, and led her to his house. It was the best thing he could think to do. It was the eve of a festival; Venice was full of music tonight, and the young men had already begun to drink and quarrel. He did not like to think of what they might do if they discovered the boy behind him was really a young woman.
He did not like Portia, not at all, but neither did he want to see her raped or beaten or thrown into a canal. And so he took her to his house, because there was nowhere else to go.
But the little fool kept wanting to linger in the streets and watch the revelers. She reminded him of Jessica, on the rare occasions when he had allowed his daughter to accompany him to the Rialto. These young women were all the same, intoxicated with the open air and the illusion of freedom. Well, perhaps he would have felt the same way if he had been born a woman.
“Come,” he said. “I would not have you seen with me.”
“Why not?” she asked, laughing a little. “No one will know me.”
“Because people will think that I have gone back to moneylending, or else taken up sodomy. I do not care to face the Duke in either case.”
She laughed again at that. Well, he supposed he had meant it to be funny, but he was not used to other people being amused by his jokes.
Shylock had bought a new house, not in the Jewish ghetto but just outside of it. There was little pleasure in becoming a Christian, after all, if one could not annoy the other Christians by moving in next door. Besides, he could not afford to keep up his old house. This one was smaller, and fortuitously inconspicuous.
“In here,” he said, unlocking the door. He had no servants living with him any more, only a woman who came in by day to cook and clean, so he had no fear of their being spotted. The old fool had forgotten to fasten the shutters on the upstairs windows again. He hastened to shut them against the clamor of fifes and tabors.
“Do you not care for music?” Portia asked.
“No.”
“I have heard it said that men who take no pleasure in music are little better than beasts, for they have no harmony in their souls.”
He stared at her for a moment, and then told her of a night he had never spoken about to any Christian. He had been a child then, in another country; there had been drunken singing, and the squealing of pipes mingling with the icy note of shattering glass. Jewish houses had been torched, and in the morning one of their neighbors had been found by the side of the road, an old man beaten to death for sport.
“So. Such men are better than beasts because they have harmony in their souls. It is an interesting notion. I must think about it some more.”
She took a step toward him. She was touching him, in the way that women touch men when their business is comfort. She had never done that before. He meant to pull away, but he let her hand linger for a moment.
“Shylock, I thought what I did was for the best.”
He had known that. He had seen them all congratulating themselves inwardly as he left the court, thinking that they had done all for the best. How could it not be a blessing to be made a Christian, after all?
He was about to tell her all the reasons she was wrong, when he realized she already knew. He remembered what it was like when the certitude of one’s first youth had given way to the perplexity of three- or four-and-twenty, and forbore to say anything more.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 04:12 am (UTC)A scrap of white silk caught his eye. She had left her handkerchief on one of the bookshelves, rather carelessly; it was embroidered with her initial. That was foolish of her, he thought. He had heard of a Venetian who had done great mischief with just such a toy.
♥♥♥
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 05:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 03:05 pm (UTC)The answer to all of the comedies!
PJW
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Date: 2010-02-21 04:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 03:57 pm (UTC)I loved this line.
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Date: 2010-02-21 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 04:43 pm (UTC)Re: оченавь даже
Date: 2010-02-21 11:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 08:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 11:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-24 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-27 03:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-04 10:35 pm (UTC)In short, brilliant work. I'm ever so grateful to have read it, and I can only hope for more. <3
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Date: 2010-03-05 02:22 pm (UTC)There will definitely be more, as soon as real life stops distracting me...
no subject
Date: 2010-03-20 04:10 am (UTC)Perhaps Portia can reason him/seduce him out of it, eh?
Love your descriptions of the scenery, and why Shylock doesn't like music, and Portia's disguise and attempt at deception, and guh, I just love this ok?
Please write more?
<3
no subject
Date: 2010-03-22 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-21 06:28 pm (UTC)I love the reference to Othello, and I love Shylock's admonishment to Jessica about teaching his grandchild to add and divide. If he weren't so bitter, he might have been the one to come up with the phrase "Jesus saves, but Moses invests."
Portia is developing in fascinating ways here. It looks like she's just now starting to see the impact of everything that she's done, but I don't get a sense that she's at all sorry for it, really.